


Hold My Hand Along The Shore

by littleblackfox



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Epistolary, Fluff, Gratuitous Hand-Holding, M/M, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-15
Updated: 2018-12-15
Packaged: 2019-09-19 11:37:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17000901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littleblackfox/pseuds/littleblackfox
Summary: So there were these two guys. They had never met, never spoken to each other, but one day one of them wrote a letter.If you held my hand, I would feel it.





	Hold My Hand Along The Shore

**Author's Note:**

  * For [inflomora](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inflomora/gifts).



> Written for the lovely [Inflomora-art](http://inflomora-art.tumblr.com/). If you're not already familiar with their gorgeous art, get over to tumblr and tell them how much you love them.  
> Many thanks to DaphneBlithe for beta reading, and to Recalibrates for patting my back when I got all panicky (because Holy Crap I love their art and got the wiggins)

So there were these two guys. They had never met, never spoken to each other, but one day one of them wrote a letter.  
_If you held my hand, I would feel it._

“Nat, what are you doing?”  
“Writing a letter, what do you think I’m doing?”  
Steve sits on the edge of the bed, one of a twin. The motel is cheap and a little shoddy, but he doesn’t plan on sleeping.  
“To who?” he asks. “A friend? You said you don’t believe in friends.”  
“We used to work together, so shut up I have a friend.” Nat gives him a sideways glance. “Two friends.”  
Steven’s heart swells up a little, but not so much that he doesn’t try and grab the sheets of notepaper she’s writing on. He wouldn’t be able to read it, a frenetic mix of Russian and English and… something else.  
“What is this, Slavic?” Steve asks.  
“Get off!” Nat laughs, and throws the pad at him. “If you’re bored why don’t you write to him?”  
“Maybe I will.” Steve puts the pad on the dresser while Nat finishes up her letter and slips it into an envelope, leaving it unsealed. “What’s his name?”  
“Bucky.”  
Later, much later when Nat is asleep and Steve gently covers her with his blanket, he picks up the pad and sits down on his bed, the springs squeaking. He doesn’t know what to say, so draws Coney Island from memory, the Cyclone and the Wonder Wheel and the waves crashing onto the shore. He signs it and slips it into the waiting envelope. He tries not to look at the address, but the word Brooklyn sings out to him. Home.  
The next morning the mission goes south, and he forgets about the letter and the drawing.

*

Weeks, hell, months can go by without Steve returning to his apartment. Work takes him far and wide with little notice, but it keeps him busy, keeps him distracted. Washington isn’t home, nowhere is home the way Brooklyn, but he likes his apartment. The clean lines and sparse furnishings make it barely distinguishable from a hotel room.  
He shoves his way through the door, dropping his bag in the hallway as he thumbs through his mail. Between the bills and the circulars a letter sticks out, his address scrawled on the envelope in ballpoint.  
When was the last time he got something handwritten in the mail?  
He drops the rest of the mail on the table, telling himself he’ll deal with them later and knowing full well that they’ll end up scattered around the apartment, used as bookmarks and shopping lists.  
There is an address on the back, Brooklyn, and Steve tears open the envelope.

_Hey,_  
_Thanks for the letter. Nat gave me your address, so I hope you don’t mind me writing back. I’m kind of kicking my heels over here, the doc said I need to do something with my hands, like paint or something, but I’m not much good at art. And it’s my left arm they replaced, so what good is that when I use my right? They say it’s something to do with neural interfaces, I don’t know._  
_I’d ask how the job went, but I’m guessing you’d say ‘classified’, right? Well, if you ever get bored, drop me a line or two._  
_Stay out of trouble_  
_Bucky_

Steve rereads the letter twice before sitting down at the kitchen table and slipping off his coat. There is a legal pad and a pen still there, the notes from his last phone call scribbled across it. And just like that he turns to a fresh page and starts writing.  
He writes about waiting in airports, how time seems to slow to a crawl at 4am when you’re waiting for a plane that won’t even take off until 7:30. He writes about how miraculous it is that you can get on a plane in Washington and find yourself in Sydney, in Gdansk, in Cremona, and somehow the travel industry has drained the experience of all its magic and wonder.  
The words seem to pour from his pen in an unstoppable flood, so fast that he keeps missing letters and putting dots in random places, but he can’t stop to fix these little mistakes, he has to keep writing until it’s done.  
And when he finally runs out of things to say he looks back at the letter, cringing at the misspellings and the frustrations and the exhaustion seeping through every word. He could tear it up, throw it in the trash along with the letter from Bucky, but he doesn’t. Instead he draws a sketch of himself several hours earlier, looking out of a passenger lounge window at a plane taking off.  
It’s only then that he parses that odd little detail in the short message, and underneath the sketch adds a hasty little ‘Can I ask about your arm?’  
Then he signs it and stuffs it into an envelope before he can change his mind, copying out Bucky’s address from the top corner of his envelope.  
The letter goes into his coat, to be mailed out later. The letter from Bucky he puts on the mantle, and rereads until the thin paper is almost worn through.

*

For once there are no evil villains trying to take over the world, no aliens pouring down from the sky or rising up from the ocean. Steven suffers through a little burst of disappointment every time he checks his mail and there is no letter from Bucky, but refuses to dwell on it.  
He busies himself as best as he can, running in the mornings and taking his sketchbook out in the afternoons. He fills it with cityscapes and parks, marble busts in galleries and scenes from the windows of coffeeshops.  
As much as he tells himself that he doesn’t care about getting letters, the lie doesn’t stick, and when an already familiar envelope appears with his mail, he drops everything to tear it open.  
It is heavier than last time, something stiff tucked in with the letter. Steve tips out the glossy little square, a polaroid, and holds it up to the light.  
The image is slightly out of focus, a man in his early thirties with a shock of nut-brown hair and wide blue eyes. He must have showered recently, the tips of his hair curling around his ears. He grins out of the white frame, head turned slightly to the side, and Steve can just make out a flash of silver where his left arm should be under a loose-fitting t-shirt.  
Wow is hardly an appropriate thing to think upon sight of a penpal, even one accidentally acquired, but Steve thinks it anyway. He puts the picture back in the envelope, only to take it out again a moment later. Guiltily, furtively, he takes another look, memorising the fine creases around his eyes and the dimple in his chin.  
Steve frowns, at himself, at the picture in his hand, and quietly scolds himself. He puts the it back in the envelope, and takes out the letter instead.

_Hey Steve,_  
_Okay, so you don’t like airports, do you? Hah, I guess I know what you mean. Did Nat ever tell you about the time we were sent to England? Some mad cult were trying to raise, shit, I don’t know, some fucking goat thing at Stonehenge. It was nuts, and they had this incense that stank like burning dog hair, or maybe that was the goat-thing. Anyway, we had this chartered flight to get up to London to give a report afterwards, you know how Shield love meetings, and the flight was at about 9am. I shit you not, this little airport we were at had a pub in it, a real live english pub, with beer and packets of pork scratchings and pickled eggs, the whole deal. Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t like a Mcdonalds near the duty free kind of deal, it WAS the airport lounge. This pub standing right in the middle of the place, with its wood and brass and everything, like they’d knocked down the walls and built an airport around it. Shit, that’s probably what happened._  
_And people were drinking in it, Steven. 9am and half a dozen guys were working their way through pints of Guinness and brown ale, I kid you not._

_Did you draw that picture? You’re a hell of an artist, what are you doing in Shield? You should be like, in a villa in Italy or somewhere painting landscapes and shit, not punching people for a living.  
Since you sent me a picture of you, I’m returning the favour. My artistic skills amount to stick figures, so you gotta make do with a photo. Before you say a damn word, yes that is not regulation length hair. If Shield is gonna retire me, I’m letting my hair grow out, we’ll see how long this fucker gets (right now it’s long enough to get in my eyes but not long enough to use a hairband. Fragile masculinity be damned, I ain’t using hair clips)._

_So I’m guessing Nat didn’t tell you about the arm? It was ‘in the line of duty’, that’s what they call it, right? I was a Shield marksman, covering Nat while she did her Black Widow routine. I was all ready for Hydra goons, and what I actually got was a trained bear. Damn thing ripped my arm clean off and beat me around the head with it._  
_Never tangle with a bear, Steve. Never._  
_Stay out of trouble_  
_Bucky_

Steve doesn’t buy the bear story for a second, but it makes his mouth twitch up at the thought of Bucky sitting down to write the most ridiculous story he could imagine. Does he sit at a table to write like Steve? Or does he sit on a couch, tapping a pen to his red lips as he figures out what to say next.  
The thought is arresting, and Steve carefully dismisses it, sitting down at the table and pulling his legal pad over. He picks up a pen and is suddenly hit by uncertainty. This letter hasn’t sat in his inbox for weeks while he was away fighting. He checks the date on the envelope, postmarked three days ago.  
Steve’s shoulders slump, and he drops the pen on the table, watching as it rolls along the surface and bumps against the pad. It’s too soon isn’t it? Too soon to write back, too desperate even?  
He drums his fingers on the table. He could be called away on assignment at any moment, and then the letter would go unanswered for who knows how long.  
He could take it with him, reply in the field like Natasha did, but that would be… wrong. It doesn’t belong there, with the waiting and the fighting and the bone deep exhaustion, it belongs in the quiet moments between missions, when he stops being Captain and goes back to plain old Steve.

He picks up the pen again, jaw tight, and starts to write. If Bucky thinks its weird to get a reply so soon, well that’s his problem, he doesn’t have to write back.  
The first few sentences are a little stilted, filled with anger at the perceived slight, until Steve settles down again, sharing his thoughts and asking questions as they come to him. When he runs out of things to say there is some space left on the page, so he draws a bear waving, deciding at the last moment to have it wave with a paw and not a severed arm. He gives the bear a little hat, perched lopsided on its head, and writes ‘Major Ursa’ underneath it.  
He thinks about pulling one of the sketches from his book to go in with the letter too, but he’d need a bigger envelope. Next time, he tells himself, stuffing the letter into an envelope and sealing it shut.

*

Five days later he comes back to the apartment after an interminable meeting at central office, and finds a reply waiting for him in his inbox.  
He doesn’t even wait until he gets back to his apartment before opening it, tearing the envelope and the top edges of the folded pages in his haste.  
He reads walking to the elevator, chuckling to himself at Bucky’s wild stories about his Shield days. He reads as the elevator takes him up to his floor, stumbling as he steps out into the hallway without watching his feet. His brow furrows at the description of the new prosthetic arm he’s waiting on; the anchors to his spine and ribs that will keep it stabilised, the artificial nerves and tendons strung through its systems. A technological marvel, he’ll be able to hold objects with it, can sense heat and pressure through it.  
_If you held my hand, I’d feel it._  
Steve leans against the door to his apartment, and rereads the sentence so many times it stops having any meaning. The words circle around in the back of his thoughts like a dog chasing its own tail.  
When he finally comes to his senses, he lets himself into his apartment, and puts the letter on the table while he makes a cup of coffee. This time Steve doesn’t worry about taking time to reply, or the coffee ring he leaves on the notepad (which gets turned into a doodle of a Penny Farthing). He fills pages with his chicken scratch scrawl and illustrations, and when it is done he slides it into a large envelope with a sketch of Brooklyn Bridge. Last of all he adds hair clips, a pair of blue butterflies held in place on the barrette with tiny springs so their wings flap. 

Four days later he gets an envelope in the mail. There is no letter, Steve guesses that will come in a day or two. What he does get is a polaroid of Bucky, his glowering for the camera offset by the glittery blur of butterflies in his hair.

*

Weeks stretch into months, and letters drop into Steve’s mailbox. Sometimes they arrive daily, little notes of things Bucky forgot to include in his longer letters, or things that he couldn’t wait until the next letter to write about. Steve gives up on any ideas of taking turns, and writes when the urge takes him, even if it’s a few words on the back of a postcard picked up while on assignment.  
Tucked in the envelopes along with the letters Bucky sends candy picked up from around the city - hot, sour tamarind chews, sweet, crumbly peanut candy and sesame brittle. Steve unwraps them and eats them while walking up to his apartment, savouring the kick of chilli and sweetness of caramel as he reads the latest news and stories.  
There are pictures with the letters too, of places Bucky visits and food he eats, and updates on the length of his hair. Steve keeps them all, tucking them away in corners and up on shelves around the apartment. He would frame them, but that would give them… meaning.  
He doesn’t want to ascribe meaning to them, or at least not yet, so he props them up where he can see them, brushing his fingertips along the edge of Bucky’s wide smile.

*

The letters stop without warning, weeks going by with nothing driving in the mail.  
Steve doesn’t notice at first, away on assignment with Barton, who is capable but lacks Natasha’s focus. When he gets back to Washington the first thing he does is check his mailbox. There are bills, a few subscription magazines that tell him it’s the start of another month, but nothing from Bucky.  
Steve doesn’t worry about it. He manages to not worry about it for roughly four hours before caving and calling Natasha. She’s still ribbing him about the bear story (and not offering up what really happened), and tells him not to worry, though it’s easier said than done.  
Steve trusts Natasha with his life, but he also knows how cunning she is, and finds himself wondering if that first letter hadn't been entirely by chance.

When Bucky finally gets in touch, there is no letter, no souvenirs, just another polaroid.  
In the picture he looks tired, dark smudges under his eyes, a sallowness to his skin. Steve notices that before he sees Bucky is shirtless, a new prosthetic folded protectively across his chest, his flesh hand cradling the silver wrist.  
Steve’s eye isn’t drawn to the segmented silver plates of his bicep or the bright stacked rings that are his fingers. He barely registers the definition of his abs or the dark trail of hair that leads from his navel to the waistband of his jeans. All he sees are the tangles in his hair, the creases around his eyes, the knotted scar tissue of his shoulder.  
On the back of the picture the word ‘Upgrade’ is written in sharpie, the last two letters barely legible.  
Steven can’t pretend to be surprised, Bucky had been talking about the upgrade since the first letters they’d exchanged. But he hadn’t realised just how much the process would cost him.  
What could he possibly say to ease the discomfort? If he weren’t so far away he would soothe the weariness from Bucky’s shoulders, rub the tiredness from his eyes. He would push his thumbs to the corners of Bucky’s mouth, turning his lips up until the smile became genuine, warm and bright and lighting up his eyes.  
Oh, Steve thinks, as everything falls into place.

New York is full of bakeries, and it doesn’t take more than a quick search to find one that delivers. For once in his life Steve fights the urge to go overboard, and instead of ordering a mixed case of two dozen pastries settles on a few, carefully considered, to be delivered daily for the next week. If Bucky wants to complain about the size of his ass, Steve won’t stop him (and any thoughts he has about it being a perfect specimen, and Steve would gladly see a little more of it, is kept to himself).  
Steve knows that he’s hopelessly out of his depth, and most likely out of his league, but he heads into the city on the advice pulled up from google, in search of soap.  
He can smell the store a half mile before he reaches the door, a pungent wash of bicarbonate of soda and citrus oils that makes him sneeze. Inside the store is black-painted but well lit, with signs hanging everywhere he looks, white paint strokes on even more black. Lumps of soaps and slabs of glycerine bars in gaudy colours cover every surface, and on the floor are trays of chalky-looking balls that smell like an explosion in a florists.  
He must look as out of his depth as he feels, because a woman with facial piercings and apple cheeks comes over to him, her smile wide and reassuring. She listens intently as Steve stutters something vague about a gift, before launching into a barrage of chatter, interspersed with remarks and asides that Steve finds himself nodding along to. Natasha would be impressed at how quickly she winkles information from him, recent surgery and scarring and _he looks tired_. In all his Shield training in resisting interrogation no one had warned him against people being nice. Sexual predation and manipulation, yes, but not soft-eyed, purple-haired women who take him by the arm and talk to him about moringa oil.  
Half an hour later she is boxing up a bewildering array of bars and bottles, with names that Steve is pretty sure are meant to be jokes but fly right over his head. He fills out Bucky’s address on a form, but his mind goes blank at the section for leaving a message. He can’t leave it empty, and it needles at him that he has no problem writing pages and pages in letters, but when faced with a little white box he’s useless.  
There’s not enough space, he thinks. Not to say all the things he needs to say, wants to say. There’s not enough paper in the world for that.  
In the end he just writes ‘From Steve’ and hands over the form.

Work takes him out of the country for the best part of a week, tracking down some unfortunate creature beating a trail of destruction through Bohemia. A _Golem_ Wanda calls it, a man of clay brought to life. Something about the creature compels Steve to go against orders to contain it.  
There is understanding in its golden eyes as they release it on the banks of the Vltava. It utters a low sigh, as if of relief, as it slumps into the river, dispersing in the water and slowly washing away.  
It stays with him, that sound of a great, aching creature finally coming to rest.  
When Steve returns to Washington there is a bundle of envelopes waiting for him, each one containing a polaroid, sent over the course of days.  
There are several pictures of pastries, blurred and slightly out of focus, held in coulis-smeared fingers. A bathroom selfie, Bucky’s face smeared thickly with cleansing masks, his tongue poking out to lick mango balm from the corner of his mouth. The last picture is of Bucky sat on the couch with a rag and a bottle of silver polish, a frown on his face as he buffs up his arm to a shine.  
Steve looks through them all, his smile so wide it makes his cheeks ache, and thinks about digging his bare feet into wet sand. Of tilting his head to the sun and letting all his heartache and troubles slough away.  
There is a number written on the back of the last polaroid. Steve stares at it for a long minute, before taking out his phone.

“Hey?”  
Steve closes his eyes. Bucky’s voice is low and warm, with a rough edge like sandpaper.  
“Hello? Anyone there?” Bucky asks when Steve is too struck dumb to speak. Idiot. “Not to cast judgement, pal, but if this is a dirty call you gotta like, do heavy breathing or something. Ask me what I’m wearing.”  
“Jesus Christ,” Steve laughs.  
Bucky is silent for a moment. “Steve?” he murmurs. “Is that you?”  
“Uh. Yeah,” Steve flushes. Idiot. What does he say now? “Yeah, it’s me.”  
“Well come on.” There is a teasing lilt in Bucky’s voice. “What are you wearing?”  
Steve looks down at himself. He’d changed out of his tac suit at the base, and is dressed in his everyday clothes. “Jeans. Uh. Jeans and a t-shirt.”  
“Sexy,” Bucky announces, and Steve promptly chokes on his own tongue. “Very James Dean.”  
“Oh my god, you’re an asshole,” Steve coughs, and Bucky laughs down the phone, all drawl and honey, and Steve has to sit down.  
“Don’t tell me this is news to you,” Bucky says, and Steve settles back in his seat, cradling his phone to his ear.

They talk for an hour, that first time. Bucky describes the new prosthetic in a rush and tangle of words, all the things he hadn’t been able to put into letters fighting to get out at once. Steve listens, doing his best to pick apart the threads of each narrative as Bucky describes the anchor points and the nerve clusters, the exercise programs (I want to be a couch potato Steve, and you’re not helping) to maintain body strength and reduce tissue damage.  
“You should let me know when you’re in New York next,” Bucky announces midway through a story about some asshole in the gym, or the best tostones he’s ever tasted, Steve can’t quite keep track.  
“Yeah?” Steve says lightly. “You gonna treat me to a taco?”  
“Tostones are completely different from taco’s, Steve,” Bucky chides. “But yeah, and we should go to Coney island, take a walk along the beach. I’ll even let you hold my hand if you like.”  
Steve’s lips move before he can stop them. “I’d like.”  
He hesitates as the line goes silent, was Bucky only making a joke? Did he screw up?  
“Okay then,” Bucky says, softer than before.  
The conversation moves on, old jobs and new people, and Steve listens and speaks in equal measure. He complains about Shield administration, how he spends more time filling out forms and attending meetings than actually doing good. He airs his concerns about new legislation, and the registration act being pushed through Congress. Bucky listens, making sympathetic noises while Steve lets the words flow like water.  
When Steve has run out of things to say, his breath a rasp down the line, all that is left is the sound of Bucky tapping his silver fingers while he listens.  
It reminds Steve of a xylophone, and when he mentions that, Bucky hums and tells him the inside of his wrist is ticklish.  
It’s a throwaway remark, but Steve keeps thinking about it, about dragging his fingers along the segmented silver, and the different ways that Bucky laughs.

*

Steve expects the letters to come to an end once they start talking on the phone. After all, they can easily fill an hour with chatter, what could possibly be left to write down?  
The letters don’t stop coming.  
They are less frequent, yes, dropping into his mailbox once every couple of weeks or so, but they don’t stop.  
The polaroids are less frequent, but Steve has no reason to complain, not when his phone is filled with pictures instead. He can’t handle them the way he does with the polaroids, can’t tuck them along the edge of the bathroom mirror or between the pages of a book or prop them up on shelves, but they’re there in his pocket whenever he needs them.  
Bucky sends him photos of everything, little snapshots of his every day; sunrise in Central Park when he’s out jogging, cups of coffee piled with whipped cream, Bucky pulling faces next to a landmark.  
The nostalgia for the city he grew up in tangles with the rush of fondness he gets from Bucky’s mugging at the camera, until the pangs of homesickness are as much for a person he has never met as the places he has been.  
Steve sends the occasional picture in return; sketches worked on by the light of the kitchen window, street cart hot dogs, and the view of the Lincoln Memorial on his morning runs. He even poses for one in the gym, feeling vaguely foolish while he stands next to a punching bag, holding his phone up high for a flattering angle. He’s pink-cheeked and sweaty in the photo, and he almost deletes it instead of pressing send.  
But send it he does, and gets a string of emojis in return. The first archeologist to stumble into an ancient Egyptian temple must have known how he felt in the face of so many strange pictograms, with no way to parse their meaning.  
The message that comes a minute later asking for a shot from the back ‘in the spirit of scientific curiosity’ pulls a laugh from his tight throat, and Steve obliges.  
Peaches and a cartoon finger and thumb in a circle he does understand.

*

“Hey, Buck?”  
“The one and only,” comes the reply. “What’s up?”  
Steve bites his lip. When he was a kid telephones had long, coiled cables that connected the mouthpiece to the cradle. You could untwist the kinks in the cord, wind it around your finger, it was something to occupy your hands while you tried to put one word in front of another.  
“You free Thursday?” Steve asks.  
“Well, Steve, you gotta understand that I’m a busy man. Netflix ain’t gonna watch itself.” Steve can tell when Bucky’s smiling from the lilt in his voice. “But yeah, I can reschedule.”  
“I’m coming to New York.” The words come out on a rush and stutter. “I have an interview. A job interview.”  
For once Bucky isn’t quick with a comeback. “In New York?”  
“Yeah.” Steve fiddles with a button on his shirt, for want of a telephone cord. “I mean D.C. is fine, I like it here. But I was thinking…” He pauses to take a breath. “I was thinking I could come home.”  
Bucky doesn’t respond, and Steve wonders if maybe he’d gotten his wires crossed somehow, that his tentative offer is unwelcome. He ploughs on, and if he’s gotten it hopelessly wrong maybe Bucky will let him down easy.  
“You want to grab a cup of coffee?”  
Bucky draws in a breath, a discordant hiss down the line. “Nah.”  
Steve is crushed for the eight seconds of silence that follows, swallowing reflexively as he tries to work out what to say, how to salvage things-  
“We’re supposed to go to Coney Island,” Bucky says softly. “Remember?”  
“Oh.” Steve remembers his first letter, written in the dark hours where sleep never found him. Coney Island and the lights reflecting on the water. “Yeah, we should do that.”

*

They meet in front of the Cyclone. Bucky stands out amongst the tourists and daytrippers, dressed in a bomber jacket and sneakers. The hair that had once curled around his ears has grown past his shoulders, and today it is tied up in a loose knot. The wind tugs a few strands of hair loose, and they fall to frame his face.  
In letters they had told each other every secret, every dream. They had built whole worlds and walked within them, and now standing face to face Steve can only stare.  
There is a dimple in Bucky’s chin. His eyes are blue as the sea, a shade that Steve will seek out in ink and watercolour tablets and never quite meet its match. The hair working its way loose from the knot is a mosaic of rich earth tones, from walnut at the nape of his neck to bronze where the sun has bleached the tips.  
And Bucky can only stare back. At the swell of Steve’s lips and the sharp lines of his features. At the breadth of his shoulders and the shape of his hands. At his eyes as blue as the sky.  
Wordless, Bucky points towards the beach and Steve nods, falling in step beside him.

(The silence will not last, and all the things they didn’t think to say will be written down, will be murmured over the phone and whispered into sleeping ears.)

“My hand is cold,” Bucky says when they reach the water, shoes sinking into the sand. “But you can hold it if you want.”  
Steve reaches down, palm skimming the silver of Bucky’s hand before running his knuckles along the hard wrist. Bucky yelps, snatching his hand away and dancing back, walking right into the incoming tide. He laughs off the water soaking into his shoes, the sunlight catching his eyelashes and turning them gold.  
His hand fits Steves as if by design, and their fingers interlace as they walk, leaving scuffed prints in the sand that cross over and switch places, and are washed away by the sea.  
It’s good, Steve thinks. It’s good that they have little to say, all their thoughts taken up with the other’s presence. The sound of the ocean says it all for them, the ebb and flow of the tide whispering of the future stretching out before them, the places they will go and the things that they will see.  
Not everything can be said with words, and Bucky’s lips are warm and salted with sea spray when they meet his.


End file.
